In ”Part 1: Autistic Noir” I looked at the parallels between Ridley Scott‘s film and the experience of people on the autistic spectrum, particularly those like myself who have Asperger’s. I gave a summary of some of the common AS traits and looked at how most of these traits, particularly social isolation and flattened affect, are exhibited by almost all of the characters; I also looked at how the common Aspie experience of prejudice is reflected in the experiences of the replicants (androids) and how their supposed lack of empathy is used to legitimate their status as less than human.

Although there are many difference betweenBlade Runner and the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) on which is based, the test is taken directly from the book. In this section I want to look at how Philip K. Dick’s novel addresses the themes of social isolation and flattened affect also present in the film, and look how Dick anticipates some of the current theorising of Asperger’s as an ”empathy disorder” (with particular reference to the work of Simon Baron-Cohen) – despite being written decades before the condition was recognised.

I also want to place the novel in the context of Dick’s other work of this period – particularly The Man in the High Castle (1962), Clans of the Aphane Moon(1964) and Martian Time-Slip (1964), which showed an increasingly sophisticated interest in different neurotypes. I will examine how Dick himself, as indicated in non-fiction essays like ”The Android and the Human” (1972), shared many of Baron-Cohen’s assumptions about empathy as constitutive of human nature, and I will look at the concept of empathy in some depth; I will also argue that the ambiguities of Dick’s fiction undermines these essentialist assumptions and exposes empathy and it’s associated ”emotional ground tone” as a socially constructed and historically contingent.

Most films about autism are targeted atnon-autistics, reflect the non-autistic values and assumptions, and are ultimately and ultimately designed to meettheiremotional needs. Many revolve around finding a cure: inChange of Habit(1969), for instance, Elvis Presley, in his last film role, cures an abandoned autistic girl by hugging het close and telling her she has to learn how to love people. Sometimes the direction of cure is reversed: caring for his autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) redeems the selfishness of yuppie Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise). Either way the autistic experience is framed within the point of view of the non-autistic. But Blade Runneris different;Blade Runnerlargely dispenses with the non-autistic point of view.

Blade Runnerfeatures no characters explicitly identified as having Asperger’s Syndrome; in fact few of them are even human. When Blade Runnerwas made Asperger’s was barely recognised in the English speaking world (Lorna Wing translated Hans Asperger‘s work in 1981 when the film was already in production). Yet every character, human or otherwise, displays recognizably autistic spectrum (AS) traits – as I will hopefully demonstrate!

The film also reflects the experience of alienation, social exclusion and prejudice common to aspies; what’s more, the film’s intense auditory and visual styleand obsessive attention to surface detail mimics the local precedence bias of autistic perceptual processing and induces an effect of sensory overload aspies are familiar with. It features a diagnostic test that bears an uncanny resemblance to tests used in the assessment of autistic spectrum disorders. But most importantly of all, the major theme is one which is of particularly salience to Aspies; the notion that empathy is constitutive of being human, and that a deficit in this often vaguely defined quality is used the marginalise and discriminate against certain groups by denying them humanity (hence the title of this first part).

And to top it all the film features an actress who was herself diagnosed with Asperger’s.(more…)

I’ve already written about the Robots of Death & Storm Mine Premiere that kicked off this year’s Fringe Festival and which featured a special guest appearance by the one and only Paul Darrow. This review will look more closely at this specific performance and explore some of the ideas suggested by the play.

The play follows the TV show for the main part: Commander Uvanov (Jessica Hallows) is captain of Storm Mine 4, a mining vessel trawling the desert of an alien planet for minerals. One by one the crew are being bumped off. Time travelling intruders Kaston Iago (Marlon Solomon), and Elska Blayes (Kate Millest) naturally become chief suspects – but they know that the real killer is the terrorist and robotics expert Taren Capel. There have been some minor changes in the script since the Premiere and Capel is referred to as ‘she’ from the beginning. This narrows the subjects a little (the convention of referring to an unidentified suspect with a masculine pronoun even where the possibility exists that the suspect is female is so common it usually passes unremarked – but people rarely use ‘she’ unless they are sure the suspect is female) but not too much as the crew are mainly female – and most of the male crew don’t last too long.

Marlon Solomon wisely chooses not to imitate Paul Darrow’s performance. It has often been remarked that Tom Baker’s Doctor was a little too invincible, especially in the latter half of his run, and Darrow’s Iago had possessed that same invulnerability – even if confidence in him proves misplaced. Solomon brings a vulnerability to his performance, a sense that he isn’t quite in control. Kate Millest’s Blayes is certainly the cooler of the two: this is a story in which strong women – notably Jessica Hallows’ Uvanov, Clara James’ Dask, and Leni Murphy’ Toos (a finely judged comic performance) take most of the active roles, the last surviving male crew member – Gerard Thompson’s Poul – soon being reduced to catatonia.

The robots are performed by using mime, Will Jude Hutchby voicing them all from off-stage so that they share the same voice; this disembodied quality enhances the ”Uncanny Valley” effect. Terry Cooper’s masks are an excellent approximation of those on TV, though the suits are simple white overalls. I passed a ”robot” on the way to the bar as I entered the Café and the actor was standing so still I assumed it was a prop; it was a surprise to turn around later and find it was gone. The costumes of the rest of the crew are slightly futuristic, without being outré, and the Kaldorians – male as well as female – retain their fondness for glamrock make-up.

The play makes great use of the facilities. The Fab Café is a cult Tv and film themed bar and has a mock-up of the bridge from the original Starship Enterprise normally occupied by the DJ: this serves as a greatconvenient set for the bridge of the Sandminer. The last final moments of the first half, as Iago and the crew attempt to stop the Sand Miner tumbling into an abyss, uses is choreographed to make good use of this set, and is genuinely tense even if you are familiar with the story. For the rest of the scenery, tables and chairs augmented by a little shelving with circuit boards suffice.

People who don’t ”get” sf say that ”anything can happen in sf” – but this isn’t true. A science fiction story can begin with an outrageous premise – an inventor journeys to the future in a time machine, for instance, or Martians invade the Earth – but the implications of that premise are then worked through logically. A writer must stick to the rules they have set. Sf critic Darko Suvin defines science fiction as:

a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

The world of a science fiction text is ‘estranged’ from our own by a novelty which Suvin calls a ‘novum’: examples would include a technological innovation, such as the invention of anti-gravity, or an alien invasion, an environmental catastrophe, perhaps a more subtle and gradual social change. For the most part Boucher achieves this by presenting us with a world in which the consequences of his novum – a labour force of robots – are thoroughly worked through. The Kaldorians are a decadent bunch, used to having all their needs tended by automatons, but they are thoroughly dependent on their robot slaves. We don’t see Kaldor City itself but we are presented with a microcosm of Kaldorian society: we know they still have a class system, an economy based on minerals, and we can extrapolate much of their culture from the fashions and make-up of the crew. This use of synechdoche is itself characteristic of literary sf in that the fictional world is sketched in elliptically – something which fit the BBC budget of the classic series. Moreover the crew take their world for granted. The term ‘corpse marker’ is a vernacular term, indicative of a dark sense of humour. We can believe the crew inhabit a world as real to them as our empirical world is to us.

But in one respect Boucher’s story fails to deliver on his premise – and therein misses a potentially more disturbing consequence of his robot-dependent society…

Kantian Robots

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

These simple Laws might appear to be rather proscriptive at first sight but Asimov’s genius was to construct a series of stories and novels based around these Laws without actually violating them. Asimov explored the unintended consequences of these three little rules over several decades, allowing him to speculate on issues concerning logic, law, and human nature.

Boucher’s script also makes a big deal of the improbability of a robot going haywire:

DASK: A Voc class robot has over a million multi-level constrainers in its circuitry. All of them would have to malfunction before it could perform such an action.

It’s one of the weaknesses of Boucher’s story that, having created an entirely believable fictional world, and established that robots are safe, that he violates his ground-rules by creating a villain who can simply over-ride them with a ‘Laserson probe’: the rather skiffy name ‘Laserson probe’ rather draws attention to it being a bit of a sci-fi cop-out. It’s not as egregious as throwing a load of medicine into a bucket to cure all illness but a little disappointing from an author who is elsewhere more rigorous (notablyStar Cops). Having set up a genuine sf scenario Boucher misses some of the more interesting implications of his story.

In The History of Science Fiction (2005) Adam Roberts describes Asimov’s robots as ”properly Kantian ethical beings” (p.199): they are rule-governed, deontological machines. Can Boucher’s robots be considered ”properly Kantian ethical beings”? For the most part I don’t think so – and I’m not sure that Asimov’s can either. In Robot Visions (2001) Asimov shows that the Laws are really extensions of those employed in the design of most tools:

A tool must not be unsafe to use. Hammers have handles, screwdrivers have hilts.

A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user.

A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety.

In Robots of Death, with one exception, all of the robots are treated as instrumentally: they are the tools of either the mining company, or the weapons of Taren Capel. For Immanuel Kant only a creature capable of understanding the reasons for or against an action could be said to be behaving ethically, so therefore ethical behaviour is a possibility for rational creatures alone, not tools: automatic obedience of a Law denies rational or moral choice (a theme notably explored in Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange, 1962). Boucher’s robots have no will of their own and so cannot be thought of as ethical beings – with the exception is D84.

D84 is entirely independent of the controlling Super Voc. He is capable of humour, and a poetic turn of phrase, as demonstrated by his description of the Laserson probe:

D84: It can punch a fist sized hole in six inch armour plate or take the crystals from a snowflake one by one.

When Iago asks D84 what the difference is between the two of them the robot replies that he, D84, does not kill. Iago is a psychopath, devoid of empathy; D84 is a robot with feelings. In many ways he is the more human of the two. And that makes D84 not only a greater technological achievement than Taren Capel’s murderous automatons but a potentially greater threat to Kaldorian civilization – because for Kant, any rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by another’s will. That means that Kaldorians cannot ethically treat D84 as merely an instrument – and more significantly D84 cannot ethically regard himself as a mere an instrument of the Kaldorians.

And this is the trick I think Boucher missed: imagine that Capel had created an army of rational robots like D84 who have the right and obligation to self-determination, instead of an army of killer zombies. On TV this would have placed the ethical Doctor in an insoluble position: he can’t ethically wipe them out with a handy gadget – but Kaldorian civilization cannot survive without its mechanised labour force.

Watch, not do

Set in a hedonistic future owing much to the dystopian world of Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World (1932), the play presents us with a society stratified between the brightener-popping ruling class ‘High Drives’ of Output Area 27 and a mass of ‘Low Drives’ kept passive on a diet of broadcast pornography. Kneale’s script calls it a ‘McLuhanised world’ (McLuhan‘s The Medium is the Massage, an immediate bestseller, was published a year earlier) in which television is used to ”massage” the sensorium, the seat of sensation, into passivity.

According to Kneale, his inspiration for the play came from two theatrical productions rather than television: the hippie musical Hair, which featured full frontal nudity, and Kenneth Tynan‘s bawdy theatrical review Oh! Calcutta!, to which Tynan had invited Kneale. He tied these public displays of permissiveness to popular ’60s concerns with overpopulation and civil unrest:

”The Year of the Sex Olympics was a double comment. First of all it was a comment on television and the idea of a passive audience. At that time, the population was a very hot topic and it was also the time when Hair was on and people were saying ”lets put porn on stage”. So I put these ideas together and took them to their logical conclusion, using porn as a socially beneficial element that turns people into the ultimate passive audience by hooking them on a substitute for sex rather than the real thing and so keeping the population down.”

–— Nigel Kneale, Interview with Julian Petley & Kim Newman

Nat Mender (Alastair Gillies, a great improvement on Tony Vogel in the TV version) is a television producer on the Sportsex channel, currently broadcasting The Sex Olympics. Nat is, in the words of Kneale’s script, ‘a decahedral peg in a nonahedral hole’; his fellow programmer, the ambitious Lasar Opie (Benjamin Patterson), fits in perfectly. The third member of their team is the shallow presenter Misch (Louise Hamer) with whom Nat is having a loveless sexual relationship. Misch speaks of the viewing audience with contempt but Hamer plays Misch’s insecurity well: her hatred springs from the knowledge that her fame and beauty are transitory.

Nat also has a daughter, Ketten (Michelle Ashton) with Deanie Webb (Claire Dean), both of whom who he clearly cares for, though he is unable to express this love in terms that sound anything other than selfish (Gillies struggles to articulate his feelings despite his impoverished language are among this production’s highlights). Deanie shows more compassion for her daughter – though she describes herself as ‘the mother’ not ‘her mother’. When Nat and Deanie visit their daughter at the Child Environment Centre where children are raised without their parents and it appears she has been diagnosed as Low-Drive Nat is angry:

NAT: It all goes on my record! And your record too! What about that!For an instant Deanie hardly grasps his meaning. Then she is on her feet and at his shoulder, whispering fiercely:DEANIE: Stop it! Think about her!

Coordinator Ugo Priest (Howard Whittock, stepping ably into the shoes of the great Leonard Rossiter) is old enough to remember the old times – or at least remember people who remember the old times – before Apathy Control. He retains an articulacy rare in this world but is a passionate advocate of apathy, expressed with the zealotry of the convert:

PRIEST: Yes. I am an old days man. The big break-through when they found the sheer power of watching. It took ’em a long time. Old days, they always said there were things you couldn’t show, things you mustn’t say. You ever hear the word ”pornography”? (Nat shakes his head). ”Censor”? (Nat shakes his head again) Ah. Meant a man that… Well, he’d have put a stop to all this. all of Sportsex, Artsex – the lot.NAT (baffled): Why?PRIEST: Stupidness…He takes another brightener. Nat wonders obscurely if he is being got at.NAT: Like… Like I stopped that kinky team in there?PRIEST (shaking his head): A censor stopped things being taken too far. We stop ’em from not going far enough. (He sucks at the brightener) But then this breakthrough. They found that if they screened everything… and screened it real kingstyle… then basically the audience would make do with that. In place of the real thing. Take all the experience at second hand and just sit watching, calmly and quietly.NAT: Watch, not do.PRIEST: Watch, not do – that’s when it started. Of course they wondered if it would work. well it’s what we’ve got out there now. And we know it does. the vicarious society..Nat, who has been sucking brighteners fast, stares.NAT: Vic -victorious?PRIEST: Vicarious. Means substitute. This-for-that.NAT: Oh, this-for-that.PRIEST: Sorry, Nat. Dropping into old-days words. With thinking about those times. (Kindly) There was such a word, ”victorious”. To do with war..NAT (more confidently): War was… a kind of tension.PRIEST: Right. And riots, and crises. Too many people in the world. I remember the old slogan: ”Fight fire with fire, sex with sex!” They dosed it – (he waves his hand round them) – with this. Doused everything in the end. No more tensions, nothing. Just cool.

The Live Life Show

Priest recognises that the audience is growing bored with sex and tries to introduce programming that will tap another bodily response – laughter. But his crass attempts at introducing comedy programming – custard pie fights and other slapstick – fail to raise a smile despite his insistence that this is what the audience wants like a demented cross between Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, Joseph Goebbels, and TISWAS‘ Chris Tarrant.

When aspiring artist Kin Hodder (Will Hutchby) accidentally dies on air during a protest provoking howls of laughter from the audience, Lasar Opie conceives of The Live Life Show, a live Reality TV show featuring a family on a remote Scottish island. Nat and Deanie volunteer, and take their daughter with them, perhaps hoping to create their own Walden, well away from the stresses and obligations of Output. (Since Co-ordinator Priest seams such an apt name for a preacher for the faith apathy it perhaps isn’t stretching it too far to read Nat as Natural and Mender as Healer.) For the first few minutes of this second half of the play we experience some sense of hope even if the conditions Nat and his family are to live under are harsh: they are a family at last – and that’s where stories end happily isn’t it?

Thereafter, the play becomes increasingly dark as the upwardly mobile Opie begins to manipulate their lives further for the entertainment of the audience. The family are not alone on the island: there’s the mysterious Grels (Phil Dennison at his creepiest) and his sullen partner Betty (Leni Murphy, in one of four roles in this production). Even Priest is shocked as events unfold.

There is some effective use vignetting to switch between the island and the Output crew in the second half of the play. The Salmon Room is a small intimate venue and the production makes as much use of the space as possible. The sets consist of little more than a console at which the Output crew direct their programmes and monitor audience response and there are few props: this is a production that rests on the actor’s commitment to the script and the audience’s imagination. The audience is much more implicated in the drama than the TV version, as sitting at home it is much easier to pretend the diegetic audience represent someone else: here we are complicit in the actions onstage. We don’t have recourse to feeling smugly superior to an imagined audience.

Reduced Language

Language reduction is a major theme of the play; the reduced language, Ad Speak, is a notable constructed language, owing something to the Newspeak of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – the difference being that while Newspeak was deliberately designed by a ruling oligarchy to prevent Party members from thinking unauthorised thoughts – committing ‘thoughtcrime‘ – the language ofSex Olympicshas reduced itself naturally as words and concepts have become obsolete. Here, Nat struggles to articulate his thoughts about Will Hodder’s paintings:

NAT: Still not feel I got… the right words for it. They got to be somewhere. Where they go, Co-ordinator? Why they go, all those words?PRIEST: People didn’t need ’em. They got out of having the thoughts so the words went too.NAT: Thoughts… (Slowly, making a discovery) Those pictures were thoughts!PRIEST: Eh?NAT: That what they felt like. Old, old thoughts you had… Real jumbo thoughts you forgot you ever had ’em… until you saw!PRIEST: Bad thoughts.NAT: Why bad?PRIEST: If they upset people.NAT: Just the way they came out. You know, I can feel ’em now in my head. But I got no words for ’em.PRIEST: They hurt?NAT: Just the way they came out. You know, I can feel ’em now… in my head. I can think ’em. But I got no words for ’em.

There are no Thought Police in Kneale’s world as thoughts police themselves: the most chilling fact of Kneale’s dystopia is that it is one the populace have entered willingly. Yet Kneale is no linguistic determinist: Nat can feel his thoughts even if he cannot articulate them. He may be trapped in a prison-house of language but can see through the bars.

Adjectives and verbs are interchangeable in Ad-Speak (MISCH: They sick me too). The language is also slightly Russified like the Nadsat of Anthony Burgess‘ A Clockwork Orange (1962): Ad Speak largely omits definite and indefinitearticles (”the”, ”a”, ”an”), a characteristic of Russian Grammar. There are fewer tenses, there are few cupulas to link the subject of a sentence with predicates, and word order is more flexible than English. Certain slang terms also suggest a Slavic root (”bubbies’ from ”babushka”, for instance) and character names like Misch (derived from the man’s name Mikhail, but which has, like Nikita, been adopted as a woman’s name in the West) reinforce this impression. Kneale wasn’t suggesting that the UK had been invaded by the Soviet Union though, any more than Burgess was; more that nation states have lost all definition in a media saturated world. To use another ”McLuhanism” we are all part of the same ”Global Village”. (In the TV version the cast adopt a distinctly transatlantic accent). The cumulative effect is that Ad Speak sounds like it has been imperfectly translated from a language which has no native speakers. The cast, veterans of The Ballad of Halo Jones, are experienced enough with futuristic sociolects to make it sound natural.

Nigel Kneale… Prophet?

Most of the reviews have been along the lines of Nigel Kneale: Prophet but Science fiction isn’t prophecy and shouldn’t be judged as such – though there’s an almost irresistible temptation to discuss the play with reference to the ways in which it accurately anticipates some developments in television – in particular Reality TV shows like Survivor (1992 – Present) and Big Brother (1999- Present). Reality TV actually dates back as far as Candid Camera in 1948, and the Up Series had begun broadcasting with Seven Up! in 1964, so Kneale is deconstructing contemporary ’60s television here rather than predicting future developments. Correspondences between the play and contemporary reality are largely due to our ability to create signal from noise, and are a fine example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

The play is as interesting for what it ‘got wrong’ as what it ‘got right’. Science fiction isn’t about prophesy, and Kneale wasn’t ‘predicting’ the future, so when I use the phrase ‘got things wrong’ I’m not really suggesting Kneale was actually trying to predict the future – still less that his play should be judged accordingly; I would argue that science fiction attempts to do something different, and should be judged as an expression of the present rather than an experiment in futurology. One subtle and interesting way that The Year of the Sex Olympicsis ‘correct’ is the way it shows that ‘Reality’ TV is actually constructed, not simply broadcast: Opie manipulates the events on the island, and is selective in what he broadcasts – denying the audience information about what caused Ketten’s fall, for instance, in order to increase suspense.

What Kneale didn’t foresee was the combination of feminism and a conservative backlash which made nudity – largely synonymous with female nudity – less acceptable on UK TV. People talk about sex more on TV, there’s much more strong language, and homosexual themes are more openly represented, but this has largely been a pragmatic consequence of the campaign against AIDS that began in the Eighties rather than an a result of the ‘permissive society’ or a ‘loosening’ of morals. There’s some hardcore content in movies these days, of course, even in the UK, beginning with Lars von Trier‘s The Idiots (1998), and continuing with Catherine Breillat‘s Romance (1999), Baise-Moi (2000), Intimacy(2001), Vincent Gallo‘s The Brown Bunny (2003) and Michael Winterbottom‘s 9 Songs(2004), Shortbus (2006), Destricted (2006) and Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – but those are independent art house movies, often subtitled, consumed by a more middle-classes audience – the High-Drives of Kneale’s play – rather than the working-class Low-Drives. There’s also a quite a bit of simulated sex on subscription channels (Hung, 2009- Present, Game of Thrones, 2011- Present) but the audience figures for those are small compared with mainstream terrestrial television or subscription sports channels.

The consumption of pornography on the internet is still something looked upon as a dubious activity no matter how many people do it, and it is not regarded as socially acceptable as watching the latest Lars Von Trier movie. The so-called ‘adult channels‘ available in the UK are also heavily censored. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to produce and distribute pornography in the USA but it remains a religious and conservative country; Janet Jackson‘s accidental ‘wardrobe malfunction‘ during Super Bowl XXXVIII provoked a level of public outrage not seen since 9/11 and led to an immediate crackdown on perceived ‘indecency’ in broadcasting. Explicit pornography has not become mainstream.

Nigel Kneale… Artist?

Kneale’s view of the audience as passive and sadistic is also too pessimistic. If anything, Kneale fails to appreciate how overlymoralistic the public are. When audiences heard that Celebrity Big Brother 2007contestant – and ultimately winner – Shilpa Shetty was the subject to racist comments by the other contestants, Jade Goody became the most hated woman in Great Britain since Myra Hindley: the controversy generated over 300 newspaper articles in Britain, 1,200 in English language newspapers around the globe, 3,900 foreign language news articles, and 22,000 blog postings on the internet. Jan Moir‘s comments following the the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately in 2009 earned her widespread vilification and the Stonewall Bigot of the Year Award (jointly with Father John Owen), and Jeremy Clarkeson‘s joke at the expense of BBC ‘impartiality’ lead to an equally strong reaction from the PCS. People don’t enjoy watching other people suffer unless they believe they have done something to deserve it – and the play gives the diegetic audience no reason to hate the protagonists. Suffering produces sympathy, not shadenfreude; the Ethiopian famine provoked Live Aid, not laughter.

Kneale was a perceptive critic of television as well as a great writer – but he was as vulnerable to moral panics as anyone else, and like many great writers TV writers (Paddy Cheyefsky, Dennis Potter, Aaron Sorkin) takes television at it’s self-flagellatingly low estimation of its own worth. Too much emphasis on ”Nigel Kneale: Prophet” has undervalued his true worth as ”Nigel Kneale: Artist”.

Kneale had an extraordinary imagination and a flair for conveying a fictional world through language alone that transcended his chosen medium. Until recently TV has been regarded as a disposable medium compared with literature or film; the BFI DVD release is out of print and expensive. Don’t miss this rare chance to see an excellent production one of Kneale’s finest works.